Wizenoze Named as a Leading Global Innovator in Disrupt 100 index 2018

Amsterdam, June 29, 2018 – The mismatch between what the internet offers and what a child needs is increasingly having a negative impact on children’s attainment and emotional well-being. Judged by leading innovation experts, Wizenoze has been selected as one of the top 100 ventures with the potential to disrupt markets globally for its solution to make the internet a better place for children in classrooms all over the world. Disrupt 100 is an index compiled by Tällt Ventures, a global data intelligence and innovation company, celebrating the ventures with the most potential to influence, change or create new global markets. Wizenoze is the only Dutch venture that is selected for the Disrupt 100.

Included in a notable list, Wizenoze has been recognised as a venture with the potential to change the world we live in by offering all students worldwide easy access to relevant and readable content on the internet through The Web for Classrooms. All sourced content in the Web for Classrooms is matched to a reading level, as well as the age of a user, for suitability.

Each company featured is judged by a panel of industry experts, including names from Uber, Google, Microsoft Ventures and Startupbootcamp, against tough criteria including the talent of the founding team, the company’s traction to date, its market potential and the impact it is likely to have on society.

Previous ventures included in Disrupt 100 have gone on to achieve successes, with the likes of Go-Jek and Grail raising two of the highest funded investment rounds of 2017. Collectively, in the last 12 months, the ventures featured in the 2017 index raised more than $3.9bn in disclosed funding.

Disrupt 100’s Founder, Matt Connolly, explains “This is now our 3rd year celebrating disruptive global innovation – and this year’s cohort is a truly exciting bunch. Each company featured is revolutionising their particular industry (as well as the world we live in) and we’re looking forward to seeing how they grow and effect change in the coming years.”

The annual index looks at innovation across all sectors, tracking ventures across industries including healthcare, agriculture, education and beyond.

Editor’s notes

Wizenoze is on a mission to help students all over the world at schools, in libraries and at home to find relevant content online. Wizenoze specialises in the readability and modern classification of written texts. The company was founded in 2013 by Diane Janknegt (ex-Director, Microsoft) and Prof. Dr. Theo Huibers (Strategy Advisor & Professor, Twente University).

Headquartered in Amsterdam and with an office in London, the company is passionate about its mission to close the readability gap on the web, especially for students and second language learners. Working with teachers and supporting schools lies at the heart of that mission. Today, the Web for Classrooms is being deployed in varied learning environments to provide easy access to relevant web-based information at the right reading level.

Importantly, our in-house software development team have become leaders in the field of developing machine learning software for readability classification. Our new, 1 to 5 classification system was developed after 4 years of academic research lead by our PhD specialists in natural language processing.

We are also active supporters of the global literacy movement. Wizenoze was recently selected by Pearson to participate in Project Literacy Lab, the world’s first international partnership focused on supporting rapid growth ventures that are positioned to close the global literacy gap by 2030.

Wizenoze is proud to have the Dutch Government as one of our investors and also has been awarded a prestigious development grant by Google in recognition of our advanced technology. In addition, our UK expansion is actively supported by the UK Government’s Global Entrepreneur Programme at the Department for International Trade, which encourages successful European companies to open up UK offices. More broadly, our latest investments have also been focused on worldwide expansion and our technology is now being deployed in India, Tajikistan, Kenya, the USA and the UAE.